When I was a student at Merton College, Oxford in 1956 and 1957, I was put off by a dining hall custom that struck me as being downright anti-intellectual—sconcing. If you were caught talking about your work, you had to buy the table a tankard of ale. It wasn't the money. It was the principle of the thing that bothered me. Now, in the mellowness of age, I'm beginning to think sconcing was not so bad. Sconcing may have been for my fellow Mertonians what hacking is for students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a coping mechanism.

At MIT anonymous student hackers perform prodigious feats of engineering designed to mock engineers. For example, in 1994 they put a police car complete with flashing lights and a half-eaten doughnut atop the iconic 150ft-high dome of Building 10. In 2003 a replica of the Wright Brothers' biplane, Flyer, appeared on the dome on the 100th anniversary of its famous flight.

The dome is a favourite spot for hacks. In 1983 it was a telephone booth. When a policeman charged with investigating the hack inched across the sloping side of the dome toward the booth, the phone began to ring.

"What should I do?" he radioed back to Chief Olivieri.

"Answer it," said the chief.

Why do students expend so much energy and imagination on such pranks? They are taking the mickey out of MIT because it is taking the measure of them. MIT is very hard. Concentrating as it does on science and engineering, its curriculum poses problems for its students that have only one answer, the right one. Being a student at MIT is a bit like auditioning for a chair in a major symphony orchestra. You either cut it or you don't.

The students want it that way. They have internalised the faculty's value system. To paraphrase Louis Prima in The Jungle Book, "They wanna be like us." The problem is that most of them aren't. A telling survey of incoming students several years ago—most of whom were in the top 5% of their high school class—asked how many thought they would be in the top 25% of their class. Seventy-five percent predicted they would make it. Tough pill to swallow, finding out how good you really are. Enter the hack. It takes the judge down a peg or two. Pulls the rug out from under the royal robes. It is a way of wearing sunglasses when the sun shines too brightly—of coping with the harsh light of truth.

I suspect sconcing has much the same motivation. Work may be important, but not that important. There are better things to talk about over dinner.

Hacking is a long-lived feature of student culture at MIT. It has been around at least since 1925 when students assembled a Model T Ford on the roof of East Campus, one of the MIT dormitories. The practice is still very much alive today.

But there is another aspect of student culture, apparent when I was associate provost for institute life, that has disappeared—the culture of protest. Between the years 1985 and 1991 protests at MIT ranged from support for homeless encampments on university property to pornography, freedom of speech and anti-apartheid demonstrations that demanded MIT divest itself of stock in corporations working in South Africa. During those tumultuous years 32 students were arrested. Then, suddenly, in 1991 the protests stopped. To the best of my knowledge there has not been a single political protest at MIT in the past 20 years.

What happened? A new kind of student started coming to MIT, so different, in fact, from the protesting Gen Xers that they were given a name of their own, the Millennials.

Here is a description of the Millennials taken from a Pew Research Center report (A Portrait of 'Generation Next,' 2007):

They maintain close contact with parents and family. Roughly eight in 10 say they talked to their parents in the past day. Nearly three in four see their parents at least once a week, and half say they see their parents daily.

As I said in my book Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows (MIT Press, 2011):

In the past students brought with them to the campus a need to separate themselves from their families, something they had failed to do as adolescents. MIT offered a perfect surrogate father/mother figure to focus all the animosity and angst of separation. The protests were their way of completing the process. But the Millennials have no such need. Hell, they like their parents. What's to protest?

This was a striking change. When I was housemaster of Senior House at MIT, it would have been perceived as a serious character flaw to phone one's parents. Once again let me quote from my book:

The idea of calling home was laughable. During long holidays like Christmas break, Senior House was almost as full as it was during term time. This anti-home attitude was aided and abetted by the so-called Buckley amendment, which made it unlawful for students' records to be made available to their parents. This was especially startling since, in many cases, the parents were footing the bill.

To say that the change in student culture has had no effect on me would be misleading. I retired in 1998 and although I still hold a position as special assistant to the chancellor, my day-to-day contact with students is nil. I do have a vantage point from afar where I am able to hear active faculty talk about student culture. Every month I host a dinner. Randomly selected MIT faculty are invited to dine and discuss freely and without fear of attribution whatever is on their mind. Undergraduate education is a recurring topic. Based on the after-dinner talk, I would say that what has had the greatest impact on the faculty is not millennialism. It is the laptop computer. This by now ubiquitous device is changing the way students ingest knowledge, including when and how often they attend class. I won't be surprised if the laptop and its several offspring turn out to be to the large lecture what the Model T Ford was to the horse and buggy.

Having said that, the laptop is not the reason for the sea-change from truculent Gen Xer to compliant Millennial. What is? I think the reason is quite simple: money. As the economic environment worsened, students depended on their parents for money. They worried about their own futures. Social protest was back-burnered to self-interest.

How long it stays there is a question for the future. But my guess is that as economic conditions continue to worsen, the pendulum will shift again and protest will be back in vogue but focusing not on social issues such as the disparity between rich and poor but on pocketbook issues like the high cost of tuition.

To paraphrase Chaucer's Pardoner: radix malorum est pecunia.

Samuel Jay Keyser is professor emeritus, special assistant to the chancellor at MIT and author of Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows which explores his academic and administrative adventures during a 30-year career